Photoshop pixel art tips from Powerhoof

Powerhoof, the makers of the popular retro dungeon crawler titled ‘Crawl‘, have a great blog for aspiring game developers and game artists (specifically pixel art).

While we put the finishing touches on our game Bits and Bites, I often go back through their blog to read about resources and tools they used, business and finance lessons, marketing tips, animation tips and even a look at their initial sales for Crawl.

This particular post I came across details some tips Barney uses when creating pixel art in Photoshop. It’s goes over many of the same points I’ve posted about in the past, but with a few additional bits and pieces that some of you may find useful:

Aliased tools

First thing is obviously to turn off all the anti aliasing.

Switch the Paintbrush for the Pencil, put the Eraser into pencil mode, and untick “anti aliasing” check boxes for the Lasso and Paintbucket. I like to go into the settings and turn off pixel grid if it’s on- that thing makes it impossible to see!

The “contiguous” toggle for Lasso and Paintbucket can be really useful. If you want to fill color on a 1 pixel diagonal line this lets you do it without individually touching each pixel.